This English translation of Karatsuba's Basic Analytic Number Theory follows closely the second Russian edition, published in Moscow in 1983. For the English edition, the author has considerably rewritten Chapter I, and has corrected various typographical and other minor errors throughout the the text. August, 1991 Melvyn B. Nathanson Introduction to the English Edition It gives me great pleasure that Springer-Verlag is publishing an English trans lation of my book. In the Soviet Union, the primary purpose of this monograph was to introduce mathematicians to the basic results and methods of analytic number theory, but the book has also been increasingly used as a textbook by graduate students in many different fields of mathematics. I hope that the English edition will be used in the same ways. I express my deep gratitude to Professor Melvyn B. Nathanson for his excellent translation and for much assistance in correcting errors in the original text. A.A. Karatsuba Introduction to the Second Russian Edition Number theory is the study of the properties of the integers. Analytic number theory is that part of number theory in which, besides purely number theoretic arguments, the methods of mathematical analysis play an essential role."

This book discusses various problems in elementary number theory, most of which have a combinatorial flavor. In general classical problems are avoided and almost no proofs are given for the presented problems. Both the difficulty and importance of the problems discussed are very variable in some are only exercises while others are very difficult or even hopeless and may have important consequences or their eventual solution may lead to important advances and the discovery of new methods. This new edition is the joint work of the late Paul Erdys, Ron Graham, and as new co-authors, Melvin Nathanson and Xingde Jia.